/var/log/orava

Minireview: Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross

I seem to be reading a lot of Heinlein-inspired books all the sudden. Not intentionally, mind you, Charles Stross is a kick-ass writer and I generally try to get my hands on all his books, Saturn’s Children is just his latest that I’ve managed to grab. It’s also clearly influenced by Heinlein’s Friday (and by his earlier “juveline” books).

The story is more than a bit confusing (and that’s perhaps its greatest fault). The hero(ine) is a sexbot named Freya; in this future, humanity has just… vanished and all the inhabitants of the solar system are “robots” of one sort or the other. What exactly happened to the humans is never quite made clear. Maybe they commited mass suicide, maybe they went off somewhere, maybe they are all lurking in some hidden fortress. In any case, humanity is long gone and the stuff of legends and rumors – and robots made for (human) sexual pleasure are also effectively made obsolete. So she does what she can to get by, running odd jobs and trying to dodge the vicious robot aristocracy that generally runs things.

Freya is one of a multitude of copies of a certain base template and keeps in touch with her “sisters” now and then. Suddenly, she lands in hot water with a local aristocrat, gets a call for help from one of her sisters, and is also offered a job. Things escalate, and soon she’s running for her life across the solar system, dodging killer robot ninja dwarves and stopping now and then for some steamy robot sex. Yes, really.

It’s a fun romp, and as usual for Stross contains a lot of in-jokes. However, the story is all over the place, and with all the implanted memories going around, can be pretty confusing to follow at times. The pacing is also a bit uneven.

Worth a read, especially if you like early Heinlein; this is a worthy homage to that style. For Stross it’s perhaps a bit under-par, but that’s comparing to a very high standard.

Card with an identity problem

Got a call from Luottokunta (the company managing most/all Finnish credit cards), asking me if I was in Finland at the moment. I said yes, and that I had been here for 3+ weeks now. Turns out that someone has been using “my Visa” in the States during the weekend, buying all sorts of weird stuff from K-Mart, Stop&Shop (whatever that is), and even a burger from McDonalds(!). Since it obviously wasn’t me (hell, we didn’t even visit McDonalds once during our trip), I told them to close the card at once.

Should not be a problem financially, I can easily prove that I was on the other side of the globe at the time. But it is a big hassle. I have to change my card info to various places (Eve Online, EMusic, etc), and to begin with I have to wait a week or so till I get a new card. Since that thing also contains my debit card, I’ll have to resort to the old-fashioned visit to the bank in order to get cash in the meantime. And of course I have to write a letter to Luottokunta once I get this month’s bill, itemizing which charges aren’t mine. Sigh.

Oh well, at least Luottokunta monitors card use in a competent fashion. Apparently the fact that the same card had been used on opposite sides of the globe at more or less the same time raised some red flags.

So… apparently someone managed to copy my card at some point when it was out of my grasp (restaurant, most likely). Or there was an illegal card reader installed at some gas station pump, or some such. It happens, but it’s always annoying.

Minireview: The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

It’s received a lot of praise and there is an upcoming movie based on it, so I thought it was high time I read The Lovely Bones. I’m glad I did… even though the book isn’t quite as good as the hype would suggest, it is a very good tale and quite an unusual one.

By the time the story starts, the 14-year protagonist Susie Salmon is already dead, having been raped and murdered, and later dismembered. Now, this might sound like the beginning of a grisly horror tale – but that’s not at all what this book is about. Susie observes things from her heaven, and tells the story of how her death affected everyone (including her murderer). That’s one of the unusual things about this book: even though the subject matter is horrible, the tone is generally gentle and understanding. Another unusual touch is the “heaven” Susie is in. It’s completely her own world, and it’s also completely devoid of religious overtones.

Susie is an interesting character, and her observations on her loved ones illuminate many things about her neighborhood (both good and bad). Her father gets obsessive about finding the murderer, while her mother retreats into denial. Her almost-boyfriend is a murder suspect in the beginning, her friends suspect she might still hang around in some form, and her murderer… well, I’ll not spoil that.

It’s a ghost story without the typical ghost story trappings, it’s the tale of the rape and murder of a child told with a gentle tone of voice. All that makes it well worth reading. It does bog down in the middle a bit; even though it’s a quick read it doesn’t quite pull its weight the whole of the time. Still, it’s worth the praise. Part of the buzz around the book comes, of course, with the fact that it’s one of Alice Sebolds ways of coming to terms with her own rape (detailed in the non-fiction book “Lucky”)… and taking that into account, the tone of the book is even more noteworthy.

Comments should now work (again)

Ok, seems that the new Typo version has a small bug with comments and the sort of url-prefix setup I’m using. Made a quick & dirty hack which should potentially fix things, and also submitted a bug report so hopefully it’ll get fixed in the trunk code too.

Minireview: The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner

John Brunner was never exactly known for his shiny happy stories, most of his best-known books are quite grim affairs and often feature warnings of future doom. In the case of Stand on Zanzibar it was overpopulation (among other things), in The Sheep Look Up it’s ecological collapse. While a common theme nowadays, it was more of a prophetic warning when this book was written in 1972.

Though it does feature his trademark pitch-black humor in places, it’s a fairly grim book. The Earth’s ecosystem has broken down under strain from pollution, most animal species have died off, and things are spiraling out of control. The population routinely uses breathing masks to filter out the pollution (breathing unfiltered air is extremely unhealthy), drinking tap water is a sure way to catch any of a dozen dangerous diseases, and getting anything even remotely healthy to eat is becoming difficult. Even the rich are slowly feeling the strain, while the poor have been dying off from the poisons for a long while.

In this eco-disaster dystopia some voices of sanity have been heard now and then – one Austin Train tried to raise awareness of the impending disaster when he was younger, then watched as his call to arms was taken up by a new generation and slowly twisted. When the story begins, Train has disappeared underground and scores of “Trainites” practice near-terrorism, sometimes with limited understanding of why they are doing what they do. Austin himself has more or less given up.

It’s a book with an ensemble cast, and told in Brunner’s trademark style of stacatto switches in viewpoints. There is no protagonist as such and the story is somewhat confusing in the beginning – but as usual with Brunner, out of the seeming chaos emerges a very coherent story.

It’s not a shiny happy book, quite the opposite in fact. But it is very topical today and a reminder of where we don’t want to go. Even though some eco-fanatics can take things a bit too far nowadays, it’s good to keep in mind that their base cause is a good one. This book is a warning, and if anything more relevant now than when it was originally written.

Minireview: Black Man, by Richard Morgan

Black Man (renamed to Th1rt33n in the States for some political correctness bullshit reason) is a newish (2007) book by Richard Morgan. It’s separate from his “Takeshi Kovaks” stories and is set in a future world not too far removed from our own. Mankind has expanded to some parts of the solar system, but it’s no paradise out there. Nor is it paradise at home. The U.S. and some adjoining countries have realigned into “Jesusland” (backward, theocratic) and “the Rim” (technologically advanced) – there are some hints given in the text that China had something to do with this split, but it’s not totally spelled out. Geopolitics is as much of a mess as it has always been, and a series of small-scale but vicious wars hasn’t improved things.

The protagonist is Carl Marsalis, a “variant thirteen” generically engineered “alpha male”. The original idea was to create a hyper-aggressive man without the useless trappings of civilization, for use as a soldier… but of course it backfired. The Thirteens were much too hard to control, and after the wars wound to a close, could not really deal with peacetime. Most of them were shipped off to Mars, which is a dusty hellhole. Some refused (and were hunted down), some made deals with various powers, some did… other things. Carl is one of the dealmakers, working for the U.N. as a sort of hit man, hunting down other Thirteens. He is not a nice person, for most meanings of “nice”.

The story kicks off with Carl getting arrested in “Jesusland” (Miami) for trying to help a girl get an abortion, and the simultaenous commandeering and crash landing of a spacecraft into the ocean by an (apparently) mentally unstable Thirteen. Carl gets bailed out of jail by government officials, who want him to track down this new Thirteen in return. While initially just planning on bailing out of the whole mess, Carl gets sucked in my events and by growing respect for his new cop partner. And of course, things are never what they seem on the surface.

It’s a bit of a problematic book. It makes good comments on racism and prejudice in general - Carl is literally black (as in skin color), but that sort of racism is long gone in the civilized world (i.e. outside “Jesusland”). On the other hand, this racism has been replaced by generic racism, with most people thinking of him and the other Thirteens as monsters (arguably with good reason). This is all fine and good, but the book gets a bit too preachy at times, and tries a bit too hard to make its point. Also, it’s a big book and gets very long to really get going – I get the feeling that it could have been condesed quite a bit. Added to this is the problem of the protagonist: he really isn’t very sympathetic. This is of course by design, since he is meant to be a genetically enhanced asshole “alpha male”, giving the finger to most forms of civilized behaviour and killing people just because they looked at him funny. To the book’s credit, he remains mostly an asshole for the duration of the book – while you do come to understand him, it’s hard to really like him.

So… dunno. It’s worth reading, especially if you like Morgan’s other books, but it’s far from his best work. It’s a very ambitious book in scope, but it doesn’t really work on all levels.

New version of Typo

Upgraded to the latest version of Typo (the blog engine I'm running), mainly because the newest stable version of Ruby (1.8.7) isn't compatible with the version of Rails the older Typo was using. Sigh.

Seems to work, more or less, and the admin interface is nicer at least (though the article writing interface seems to be a bit funky). Will have to play around with it.